Margaret Kerry, Disney's real-life Tinker Bell, has died at 97
The actress and dancer whose pantomime gave Disney’s animators their Tinker Bell died June 11 in Wilmington, North Carolina. Her family says to look up for a brighter star in the night sky.
Margaret Kerry, the actress and dancer who gave Tinker Bell her body language, died Thursday, June 11 in Wilmington, North Carolina. She was 97. Her family announced her passing in a statement on her Facebook page, and local station WECT reports the cause was lung cancer.
If you’ve ever watched Tink stamp her foot, plant her hands on her hips, or pout her way across the screen in Peter Pan, you’ve watched Margaret Kerry. Walt Disney’s animators needed a live-action reference for a character who never speaks, and Kerry was filmed on a soundstage pantomiming every scene. The footage became the foundation animator Marc Davis and his team drew from.
The character had no dialogue. Everything Tinker Bell feels in that movie, the jealousy, the temper, the devotion, had to come through a dancer’s body. It came through Kerry’s.
“She’s feisty, and I call her beguiling,“ Kerry said of the character in a 2020 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. And she got to speak in the film after all, just not as Tink. Kerry voiced the red-haired mermaid in the same picture.
A Hollywood life that started at six
Kerry was born Margaret McCarty on May 11, 1929, in Springfield, Illinois. Her mother died in childbirth, and she was adopted at three, renamed Peggy Lynch, and raised in Los Angeles, where the work started almost immediately.
Her first role came at six, playing a fairy in the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She danced in Our Gang shorts, doubled for Elizabeth Taylor on National Velvet, and landed a featured role in 1948’s If You Knew Susie opposite Eddie Cantor, who decided Peggy Lynch needed a better marquee name and rechristened her Margaret Kerry.
That same picture featured a young Bobby Driscoll, who went on to voice Peter Pan. The two future residents of Neverland shared a film years before either knew where they were headed.
After Tink, Kerry built a long career in voice work, including Clutch Cargo and The New 3 Stooges, where she also appeared in live segments alongside Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe. Her 2016 autobiography, Tinker Bell Talks: Tales of a Pixie Dusted Life, collected seven decades of stories, and she spent her later years as a beloved regular on the Disney fan circuit.
The love story at the end
Kerry’s last chapter reads like something a studio would reject as too sentimental. In 2020, at 90, she married Robert Boeke, a retired oil executive who had been her boyfriend roughly seven decades earlier. She had kept a bracelet he gave her all those years. They wed on Valentine’s Day.
Boeke died on May 24. Margaret followed eighteen days later.
Tinker Bell outgrew the movie that created her. She became Disneyland’s mascot, the pixie-dust opener of The Wonderful World of Disney, the fairy over the castle. All of it traces back to a dancer on a bare soundstage in the early 1950s, acting her heart out in silence.
Her family asked that donations go to the Thalian Association Community Theater in Wilmington in place of flowers. And they asked one more thing: find the “Second Star to the Right“ some clear night soon. It may be shining a little brighter.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (theme park editor) and the Pirates and Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Kerry family statement via Facebook (June 12, 2026), verified for the date of death, location, and the family’s tribute and donation request
WECT Wilmington (June 12, 2026), verified for the cause of death and local confirmation
The Hollywood Reporter (June 12, 2026), verified for the biography, filmography, the 2020 interview quote, and the Boeke marriage timeline
Deadline (June 12, 2026), verified for corroboration of the death announcement